IT is not magic pixie dust – Page 6

Is Google Streetview NL In Breach of EU Data Protection Law?

Published on March 20, 2009

Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.

The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.

So far Google’s defeated its legal challengers – but will EU data protection laws defeat Google?

Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.

That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).

This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.

Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?

Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.

Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .

I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.

Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?

UPDATE

Heh.

When interviewed, a Google Streetview driver/photographer demanded he not be photographed.

Pirate Bay being sued? But that trick never works

Published on February 16, 2009

More inept scaremongering from the “creative” industries:

The Pirate Bay is the world’s most high-profile file-sharing site and is being taken to court by media firms including Sony and Warner Bros.

The men face up to two years in prison and a fine of $143,500, if convicted.

[…]

“It’s a trial that regards four individuals that have conducted a big commercial business making money out of others’ file-sharing works, copyright-protected movies, hit music, popular computer games, etc.”

[…]

Mr Warg, in a webcast on Sunday, said: “What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again.

“It has a life without us.”

File sharing is not going away anymore, no matter how many of these lawsuits the record or movie industry launches at the villains du jour. What we need is a system similar to what already exists in some countries for compensating authors for library loans, where downloading is legal and free and artists are compensated for
their work based on numbers of downloads.

Tories and IT, A Match Made in Hell part II: Electric Boogaloo

Published on February 11, 2009

So yesterday Palau brought you the story of the Tories’ internet witchhunt against a supposed undercover journalist looking for dirt only to discover she wasn’t, actually. Today we get a perhaps even worse example of Tory IT bungling, as the party has been caught in perhaps the saddest thing you can do to win an (online) argument: altering a Wikipedia page:

The Tories have admitted a member of staff altered a Wikipedia entry on the artist Titian after a row between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

During exchanges at prime minister’s questions, the Tory leader mocked Mr Brown for talking of Titian at 90, when he said in fact he had died age 86.

Shortly afterwards a Wikipedia user registered at Tory HQ moved his birth date forward by four years.

The party admitted an “over-eager” member of staff had been responsible.

David Cameron has since been disciplined for his gaffe and has had to hand in his Imac for a week.

Tories and IT, A Match Made in Hell

Published on February 9, 20092 Comments

“Ah, but is is she one of us”?*

This story about London Tories shooting themselves in both feet from Recess Monkey will drive anyone who’s still hoping the Conservatives under Cameron will one day step up, get rid of the current incumbents and just bloody fix things to hair pulling despair:

Carla Jones had a couple of hundred “friends” on Facebook. She’s a self-declared Conservative and was a member of various Conservative supporting Facebook groups.

That was until http://www.londonspinnews.com outed her as an under cover Mirror journalist looking for “dirt” on Conservatives’ Facebook pages.

Mass defriending, much twittering, then ritual denunciation on Tory blogs led to Carla Jones being subjected to a deluge of abuse and threats of that special, conservative kind:

This weekend a flood of CCHQ Press Office emails and text messages warned Tory politicians and activists nationwide of the sedition of Carla Jones and called on them to “de-friend” her or on Facebook.

Tory blogger of record Iain Dale posted a warning to readers, as did the usually level headed Shane Greer. A number of Tories changed their Facebook statuses to messages like, “…warns all CF members that “Carla Jones” is not a Tory at all, but an underhand hack from the Daily Mirror!”

Oooh, those pesky meedja whores, they get everywhere. Hurrah for London Spin News, fearlessly exposing the Evil MSM’s minions! Ah, but wait … fancy that, London Spin News turns out to be… a Tory PR guy’s fake news site, which he writes using a pseudonym from the ‘dole scum’ comedy Shameless. So droll! How they must’ve chortled at the Conservative Club bar!

But fair enough, no one likes a spy in their party and surely it’s reasonable enough to warn your fellow party members, isn’t it, even if you are a lying git yourself? Ah, but it gets worse…

Recess Monkey actually knows Carla Jones. We met at a Conservative Way Forward event at Tory Conference last year. And amusingly, she’s not only nothing to do with the Daily Mirror, but she’s a former CCHQ staffer…

Steven describes himself as a “former Vice Chairman at Exeter University CF where he quadrupled the membership and ran the 2005 election campaign across campus. He is an experienced PR consultant specialising in technology, business and financial services.”

So “experienced PR consultant” Steven George is using a fake ID to trigger the bullying and ostracism of a young woman on the grounds that she is using a fake ID – and in the process accusing the Daily Mirror of using underhand tactics to gain access to Tory facebook profiles…

A young woman who’s actually a colleague. Oops. It takes a perverse kind of PR talent to shoot both feet with both barrels at the same time.

Go read the whole thing; what I’ve quoted gives only the merest flavour of the bumbling incompetence. I’d laugh if it weren’t so bloody tragic; this shower of useless hoorays and failed bankers may just get elected, not because of but in spite of their lack of policies. We’re past caring, just get rid of Labour, enough already.

But if the Tories can manage to attack and destroy one of their own best activists with Facebook alone, can you imagine what they could do in power someone they don’t like, given control of RIPA or Contact Point? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

[*Explanation for those not quite so ancient as me]

Schadenfreude, part 3: BNP edition

Published on November 19, 20081 Comment

Via Lancaster Unity: entire membership of the BNP online:

Not only does the data, now available online, include the entire membership list with full names (and former names where there have been changes for any reason), addresses, contact numbers, email addresses and in many cases the member’s age, particularly where those members are under eighteen. Yes, that’s right. This list includes members as young as fourteen, male and female. Where a family membership is bought and paid for, the whole family is listed.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the notes that are attached to many of the entries leave a lot of the members open to difficulties in their jobs, some of them being in the armed forces or the police and the BNP too – an illegal combination, and where not illegal, frequently frowned upon. Other members are noted as construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, police officers, company directors and teachers among many others.

Like this wasn’t enough, the BNP has also listed hobbies or interests where for some reason they are deemed relevant. Thus we have short-wave radio hams, amateur historians, pagans, line-dancers and even a witch (male).

Whoops.

As Lancaster Unity says, there are “strict limitations” on what you can say about this in the UK, so they don’t link to the list directly, but for anybody with a modicum of Google skills it can be easily found…

UPDATE. You know the best thing about this? The BNP and/or allied organisations have for years been spying on and outing British leftists on their R*dw*tch site, which in the past has led people to be beaten up because they were featured on it. It must be karma that this is now happening to themselves. Of course, despite the BNP always wanting to play the persecuted victims, the likelyhood of BNP members being beaten up because they appeared on this list is small. But I think a lot of people in sensitive positions will have some explaining to do.